Self-awareness is key in our ceaseless investigation of the everyday.

Allowing us to discover essential truths about ourselves, that lead to a much greater sense of contentment

Yesterday’s schedule really got away from me, which I feel was very apparent in my article, one of many that has continued to detail my current playthrough of the Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater remake, dubbed Delta, and a dubious effort of conceptual worth I finalized at the 11th hour, an article of which was the result of what essentially equated to a rush job of sorts. Ironically, it is also possible literally no one noticed this occurrence, and anyone who did read the piece appreciated it as if just another alright article, leaving me as the sole survivor of an elaborately fictionalized disaster. This is an interesting phenomenon to me,as what I may have experienced about my own work, I have most certainly been on the other side of in the past, as visual artists will show me some (not yet released) excellent work, and begrudgingly so, feeling as if the piece is filled with irksome blemishes, only for me to comment on the brilliance in front of me, with nary a defect for me to add negative utterance against. The ridiculous twist here, the one that relates to a sense of belonging, is that it often takes the form of isolating alienation.

C’est la vie.

This work week must have been more engaging than I initially gave it credit for, as I am staggeringly wiped out at present standing, making the ability to structuralize productive or ambitious thought processes near impossible to maintain for any length of meaningful time, separating me entirely from intensely intimate intellectualization I so desperately yearn for. The consolation prize thereafter entails a silver lining of sorts, coming in the form of a stark reminder that one is not necessarily able to think their way through every difficult situation, leaving them only to fend for their lonesome self through feeling their way to a desired outcome in the face of adversity.

That last sentiment just mentioned, feeling vs thinking, is not just something that I have detailed before, but also related to a current idea I have kicking around my head, one that details the “logic” of stealth, and why so many seem to fail the standard of adaptability, not realizing that their fabricated expectation of reality does not match the mathematical certainty of it, and all that entails. Unfortunately, and as mentioned prior, my brain power is now so compromised, the idea behind the article is simply eons beyond me, and therefore, may yet have to wait another day to see the light that comes with it.

This delay however, has an added knock on effect of being a delightful reminder of what separates me from the herd in many distinct ways, one of the more integral of which is through my interactivity and comprehension of gaming at large, and how I both process and subsist within the virtual as a result. To wit; whereas many may simply turn on a game to switch off, in some sense, I am the complete opposite, as I am not normally *just* playing a game, as it were, but developing a standard, cultivating a discipline, and articulating a system of being as I navigate any virtual realm, in order to better understand myself through the very framework of the metaphysically binding essence of temporality pervading my spatial awareness at the moment. Though, even as I type this, and intermittently consider the reality of the situation as it pertains to me and others that I am expounding upon, I am realizing that we are all doing what I propose that I am doing when playing, the greater distinction of merit that separates us is the level of awareness that is going into the sense of navigation and learning throughout the process. This inability of others to so often fail to grasp the syntactic meaning of metaphysical that surrounds them, is what so often betrays them, in their own slow downfall of tragic turmoil, thus negating a sense of self in the process.

Which does further help to distinguish why I end up writing about gaming the way I do, as I rarely tend to address the moment to moment with any riveting excitation on the matter, as my mind is more inclined to explicate upon systems and functionality of self through which those systems flow through, as if detailing the outline of a river embedded into a mountain side, forever flowing with a system of rationale, though always changing throughout the process. The simplistic moment of even something as simple as stealthing my way through a warehouse of enemy troops, which upon casual observance, may just on the surface level appear to look like a lot of waiting around, persisting by my quiet lonesome self betwixt deafening silence and dynamic mortality, is in fact, a massive tangent of rampant conceptualization, critically exposed upon a backdrop of intangible navigation, juxtaposed between the real and the virtual systemization of self-discovery via interpretation of meaning through relativity.

In some queer way, though that last thought seems as if a tenaciously thick thought with which one cuts through, is in fact, more representative of a feeling of the matter more than a thinking of it, with a channeling of purpose and reason, albeit energetically speaking, more so than a thorough breakdown of cognitive efforts in the realm related to triumph and circumstance. Even in those moments of earnestly felt presence over genuinely thought actions, the vivacious nature of how one entangles themselves through the whimsy and spirit of humanity and meaning tends to blend, metaphysics hellbent on codifying itself through the world of forms and standards of the virtual real.

All of which leads me to the notion that, the absurdly profound is often mistaken as a trivial aside, though to avoid this mistaken assessment entirely, and to understand the two as one in the same notion, as opposed to diametrically opposed opposites, is to remake the conception of oneself, contrasted upon the thoroughly comprehended and seriously understood.

-Pashford